Review: Harrier Squadron: Ghost Flight
- 51 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By Charles E.P. Murphy
Thanks to the efforts of the multinational Harrier Squadron, the mid-90s Third World War between the Asian Bloc and Western Federation has ended. Europe is attempting to rebuild. However, there’s another multinational team of air aces out there: Ghost Flight, a gang of pirates in mismatched aircraft who are preying on cargo ships bringing in much-needed aid for both sides! With ASBLOC accusing WESTFED of using the Ghosts as a proxy, Harrier Squadron need to shut them down hard to stop the war breaking out again.
But Harrier ace “Hob” Hogget finds out the Ghosts don’t want to fight him, they want to recruit him…
Commando Picture Weekly has been resurrecting various old DC Thomson war strips in digest-size format, and evidently the first revival of the 1980s Harrier Squadron – who were set in the near-future and not thirty years in the past back then! – by the same creative team had done well enough to net a sequel. Some time has passed but the tentative peace from Armistice Day remains, with the Ghost Flight providing an even more ‘boys own’ set of antagonists than dastardly Soviets. With their multinational backgrounds and a hidden base, the air pirates come off as a twist on DC Comic’s WW2 aviator heroes the Blackhawks, if the Blackhawks preyed on Marshall Plan deliveries; there’s a cute female antagonist for Hob to chat with; and in a nice period detail, the ghost symbol on their plane tails looks a bit like Pac-Man’s foes!
This story does even more with the alternate history war, giving us a hodgepodge of period planes – MiG-21’s, Saab Drakens and Viggens, and a Norway-flagged Canadair Starfighter to give a female pirate Nordin a distinct jet – in flight together, all after the iconic Harrier jump-jet. Who will win? Seeing these match-ups is part of the appeal, with Swallow admitting on his blog that he wanted to highlight some of his favourite fighter jets. This is something only AH can do by giving us a reason why a period Norwegian jet would be gunning for the RAF. It’s also a nice bit of worldbuilding that the Ghost planes are all Russian or Scandinavian models, indicating this is where the pirates mostly hail from and that they’ve nicked their planes from a specific front of the war.
As with the previous issue, James Swallow’s script is a classic British war comic style, told cleanly and with bloodless violence (though a particularly grizzly death is implied near the end), while Esteve Pol’s art is detailed and realistic with both the period equipment and normal men in their crumpled clothes. This is still a digest comic with its specific format of rapid plot movement, one to three panels a page with captions to gloss over jumps between the panels and help explain what’s happening. If that format leaves you cold, you’re not going to enjoy this in the same way you won’t enjoy a Silver Age Spider-Man if you don’t like Stan Lee’s exuberant prose style. If you do like the style, you get to see a Harrier with depleted weapons trying to evade a swarm of foes and fight back using the Norwegian wastes around them!
As with the previous story, the breakneck pace is relaxed as Hob gets to see the Ghosts up close on their own terms, enjoying themselves when they’re ‘off the clock’. Their leader Razor, his grim 2IC Brikov, and the thrill-seeking Norwegian Nordin aren’t the most detailed characters, once again the format necessitating that they’re quickly sketched out, but there’s an interesting detail that all of Ghost Flight are former ASBLOC prisoners of war who broke out together, disgruntled WESTFED pilots and criminal ASBLOC ones finding common ground in feeling abandoned together and so standing together. Nordin gets extra detail, as we learn she deserted because (implicitly due to gender) she was “tired of sitting on the sidelines while others got the glory” and doesn’t care what the target is as long as she finally gets to engage it. Hob gets a moment of rule-bending glory-seeking when he pursues the enemy on his own, showing us why the Ghosts would believe he’d be willing to switch sides. And he’s tempted by seeing how the other side lives, but as Razor will go on to lament, in true Commando form Hob remains loyal to his oath of service.
Getting a sequel this fast, and the way the story ends, implies Commando have plans for more Harrier Squadron AH tales. Fingers crossed that they keep coming!
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.